In the first part of this post, I’ve given a little background on how I became introduced to Ray Bradbury’s stories. After detailing Dandelion Wine, I feel talking about his shorter works is the next order of business. I own a collection of these called “The Stories of Ray Bradbury” which includes what Bradbury considered his best 100 short stories. I went through these today and picked out my favorites. I feel it’s necessary to qualify that statement. There are more than a few of Bradbury’s best stories that have become components of the longer work Dandelion Wine. Since I’ve already reviewed that work I’ve left these short stories out of this selection process.

Here are my selections for the best of the best in the same order as they appear in the book:

The Crowd

The Scythe

The City

There Was an Old Woman

There Will Come Soft Rains

The Veldt

A Sound of Thunder

Invisible Boy

The Fog Horn

Hail and Farewell

The Great Wide World Over There

Skeleton

The Man Upstairs

The Jar

Touched with Fire

The Town Where No One Got Off

Boys! Grow Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!

The One Who Waits

Now here’s the thing. I could easily have added double this number. Almost all the stories are good. But these are the ones I especially like. So, this selection probably says more about me than it does about Bradbury’s best of the best. But that can be said about any critic’s choices.

An interesting fact I discovered after making this list is that there are at least three stories in this list which I don’t think have any SF&F content in them whatsoever. They are just studies in human nature. And yet they appear on this list. Which I take to mean that Bradbury finds people interesting and knows how to make them interesting to his readers. Now, that may not seem remarkable, but look at the people writing at the same time as Bradbury. Let’s take Isaac Asimov. If you read Asimov’s long or short fiction what you will find is that he is a purveyor of ideas. But his characters, even his protagonists are ciphers. There isn’t any emotional content worth mentioning. And that even counts the scenes where the action is dependent on an emotional response from one of his characters. He could just as well have been describing billiard balls ricocheting around a pool table. You might even see the psychological logic of the emotional response but you won’t experience empathy or interest in the character as a human being because of it. It’s just a plot device.

This was why Bradbury was different back then. He wrote people in SF&F stories as if they actually were people. Better writers back then were also doing this to some extent. Heinlein’s characters displayed more individuality than the average and this is one of the reasons why he is still enjoyed. But Bradbury brought this to a much higher level.

What else can be definitely said about Bradbury’s stories? I would say that he almost exclusively deals in the foreground of the picture. By that I mean that his subjects are almost always face to face. If Arthur C. Clarke were describing a nuclear holocaust you would see it from orbit. You would see the ballistic paths of the ICBMs and you would be at the top of the parabola when one missile starts to descend. And you would see the individual nuclear ignitions across the face of the globe like some fireworks display. That’s not Bradbury. With him you’ll see the aftermath of a suburban home on the edge of the kill zone. You’ll see the toaster in the kitchen and you’ll see the shadows of the family imprinted onto the side of the house facing the gamma ray flash.

Even when Bradbury does write a story of aliens invading earth you are not going to get War of the Worlds. You’ll get that same suburban neighborhood with husbands and housewives and little Jimmy working on his hobby in the basement.

So now I’ve said a bunch of words about Bradbury’s short fiction. If you’re looking for hard-core technical sf or even just plain old amusing space opera do not stop at Bradbury. Move right along. There’s none of that here. But if you want to delve into the mysterious world within a world that is the human soul take a trip with him. It might strike a resonant chord. Or it might not. Either way you’ll learn something.

When I was a kid back in the third quarter of the twentieth century I came upon science fiction in the children’s section of the Brooklyn Public Library. And so I read Heinlein’s and Asimov’s juvenile sf stories. As I got a little older I was able to borrow from the adult collection and soon discovered all the golden age authors and some of the newer, edgier writers. But at a certain point I discovered Ray Bradbury. I remember he had two collections called R is for Rocket, S is for Space. But when I read them I found out he wasn’t writing space opera. In fact, some of his stories didn’t seem to be science fiction at all. At the time, I didn’t know what fantasy was. They just seemed to be strange stories. Later on, I found some of his stories showing up on “The Twilight Zone” TV series and this helped me categorize them as something weird and fun. But whatever I called him Bradbury was different from the other writers I knew. Each of his stories had to be evaluated on the merits. Some of his stories lacked fantasy plot elements and at the time these stories seemed lacking in interest. Others were almost horror stories and these kept my attention best. Even his most externally identifiable science fiction stories, “The Martian Chronicles,” didn’t feel like other science fiction stories. Even if there were ray guns and aliens and space ships it didn’t seem as if these were the point of the story. They were more like parables or morality tales. And to a kid this was perplexing. But I always considered Bradbury as something worth reading. He was high value.

Fast forward twenty years. It was the late nineteen eighties. I was in an old used bookstore in Boston during my lunch hour from a design engineering job I had. I hadn’t read any science fiction in a while. I was browsing through a pile of books that had been displayed earlier in the year as summer reading. There was a used hard cover book with a mylar library-type jacket cover on and a cover painting of a little blond haired boy virtually covering the pavement with his chalk drawings of lines and shapes. The book was called “Dandelion Wine” and the author was Ray Bradbury. It was a novel length book and it surprised me because I didn’t remember Bradbury writing many novels. At the time “Fahrenheit 451” was the only one I could think of.

On a lark, I bought it. I put it on my bookshelf and figured I’d get to it when the project I was on slowed down. Well I forgot all about that book and before that project slowed down I had changed jobs and was too busy for reading. It was about nine months later in July, when I picked it up again. I was going on vacation with my wife and kids to Old Orchard Beach, Maine for a week. It’s a very working class old beach resort where middle class people go to sit by the ocean and let their kids dig sand castles and swim. And later on, you can go down to the pier and buy bad pizza and ice cream for your kids and let them get fake tattoos or go down to the amusement park and watch them be centrifuged in the dozen or so kinetic devices that are used to extract dollars from parents and regurgitated food from kids’ stomachs. The several years I brought my young family there are among the happiest memories I have.

Anyway, when the family settled in the beach house at night and the kids settled down to reading or watching the TV I picked up Dandelion Wine. And I was surprised to find I had already read it. But wait, not really, I’d read parts of it. What Bradbury had done was patch together a number of his older stories along with transition scenes that tied them together, and make a narrative about a summer for a boy and his family and neighbors in Green Town, USA circa 1928. What it really was, was an ode to the boyhood Ray Bradbury had lived and imagined in Waukegan, Illinois. He used the memories of his childhood home and passed them through the story writing algorithm in his head and invented a world that struck me as remarkable. Here were the mundane short stories that as a kid didn’t click with me because there were no monsters or space ships. Now they were knitted together to talk about what was magical about being a twelve-year-old boy in a small mid-western town in the early twentieth century with three months of summer vacation ahead of you. They are stories about family and friends and growing up and living and getting old and even dying. And they are mostly about being a kid.

Since that summer I’ve re-read that book a dozen times in whole or part. I mostly read it when I have some vacation time in summer. This year I’ll be sixty. When I read that book I’m not even sixteen, I’m twelve. It’s remarkable. I didn’t grow up in a small town. I grew up on the relatively mean streets of Brooklyn, NY. And I was born forty years after him. But I can understand what he’s saying and feeling in his alter ego character. He’s captured the essence of boyhood in its quintessential form, summer freedom. And the setting is a simpler time and place. It’s idyllic. Not realistic but almost archetypal.

I imagine there are many for whom this type of story has no appeal. It’s not high adventure or technical fun. But if any of this strikes a chord try the book out.